A parable for our time?

1. A parable for our time? You decide!

2. Bull Mountain • The Bull Mountain was once covered with lovely trees. But it is near the capital of a great State. People came with their axes and choppers; they cut the woods down, and the mountain has lost its beauty. Yet even so, the day air and the night air came to it, rain and dew moistened it till here and there fresh sprouts began to grow.

3. Finish the tale • But soon cattle and sheep came along and grazed, and in the end the mountain became gaunt and bare, as it is now. And seeing it thus gaunt and bare people imagine that it was woodless from the start. *Now just as the natural state of the mountain was quite different from what now appears, so too in every man…there assuredly were once feelings of decency and kindness; and if these good feelings are no longer there, it is that they have been tampered with, hewn down with axe and bill.

4. Bull Mountain continued • As each day dawns they are assailed anew. What chance then has our nature, any more than that mountain, of keeping its beauty? To us, too, comes the air of day, the air of night. Just at dawn, indeed, we have for a moment and in a certain degree a mood in which our promptings and aversions come near to being…

5. …as are proper to men. But something is sure to happen before the morning is over, by which these better feelings are ruffled or destroyed. And in the end, when they have been ruffled again and again, the night air is no longer able to preserve them, and soon our feelings are as near as may be to those of beasts and birds; so than anyone might make the same mistake about us as about the mountain…

6. …and think that there was never any good in us from the very start. Yet assuredly our present state of feeling is not what we begin with. Truly, • “If rightly tended, no creature but thrives; if left untended, no creature but pines away.”